The McCain campaign thinks that it has an opportunity to turn their candidate's stupendous gaffe -- failing to recall how many houses his family owns -- into a positive by running an advertisement linking Barack Obama to Tony Rezko. Obama, claims the McCain campaign, got help buying his house from Rezko, a Chicagoan who has since gone to jail but received some $14 million in taxpayer money.
The problem with this attack? Aside from being thoroughly misleading -- Obama has not been seriously alleged to have done anything unethical in his interactions with Rezko -- this ad is a serious strategic blunder by the McCain campaign. Why? It blows wide open the door to talk about McCain's all-too-close relationship with Charles Keating and well reported on though somewhat forgotten charter membership in the so-called "Keating Five."
The Keating Five is an old story, so many reporters have shied away from saying much about it because it isn't new -- there aren't a whole lot of new developments in the story. But with McCain talking about allegedly shady relationships, the opportunity is there to go back over McCain's ties to Keating -- whose nefarious activities, which were at least in part aided by his relationship with McCain, ended up costing the American taxpayer $3.4 billion (a whole lot more than the $14 million Rezko was alleged to have received).
Just how close was McCain to Keating? Take a look at this rundown I posted back in January:
Though McCain might try to downplay his involvement, his campaigns received $124,000 from Keating and his associates during the 1980s (AP, 3/2/91), and McCain was described as being personally closer to Keating than any of the other members of the Keating Five (Roll Call, 1/20/92). What's more, McCain accepted more than $15,000 in free trips from Keating, including vacations to Keating's resort in the Bahamas -- trips that McCain failed to disclose at the time (New York Times, 2/28/91; San Francisco Chronicle, 12/3/90).
In the end, the crash of Keating's savings and loan -- which had been shielded by some of his best friends in the United States Senate -- cost billions to the American taxpayer, as mentioned above, and all told the federal government ended up on the hook for close to $125 billion in the fallout of the crisis that befell the underregulated industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Does McCain really want to have to talk about all of this? About the Bahaman vacations he took paid for by Keating? Probably not. But he may soon have to as a result of the shortsightedness of his campaign advisors. Nice move team McCain!
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